Thirty reasons. Michael Tymn in his blog, here and here.
Excerpts:
1. Fear of Death: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human mind like nothing else,” wrote anthropologist Ernest Becker in his 1974 Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Denial of Death. Becker explained that to free oneself of death anxiety, nearly everyone chooses the path or repression. That is, we bury the idea of death deep in the subconscious and do our best to escape from the reality of it while avoiding any discussion of what might come after, whether it be total extinction, a horrific hell, or a humdrum heaven. No consideration is given to the more dynamic and progressive afterlife suggested by modern evidence.
2. Philistinism: In escaping from the reality of death, we concern ourselves with mostly meaningless activities – reading and watching fiction, playing games, idle chatter and texting, etc. – what Søren Kierkegaard, known as “the father of existentialism,” called philistinism. A philistine was man fully tranquilized with the trivial. As Kierkegaard saw it, most people are so absorbed in philistinism that they don’t even realize they are in constant despair from their fear of death. Pioneering psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote that most of his patients were non-believers, those who had lost their faith. They were neurotics. “They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking,” Jung explained. “Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning.” In effect, a philistine, even one who subscribes to a religion, becomes increasingly indifferent to matters of the spirit.
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4. Religious Fundamentalism: Based primarily on self-serving or misinterpreted passages in the Bible, most of orthodox religion saw the mediumship studied by psychical research as a demonic practice. Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that some messages coming through mediums conflicted with various Church dogma and doctrine.
5. Scientism: At the other extreme from religious fundamentalism is scientific fundamentalism, also called scientism, a belief that nothing can be accepted as truth unless subjected to testing by application of the scientific method, including replication. The scientific method begins with a materialistic/mechanistic a priori assumption that brain and mind are one in nature...
6. The Causality Paradox: The religionist, the scientist, the media and the general public all assume that we must come up with proof of God before dealing with the survival issue. No God, no afterlife, is their illogical reasoning.
7. Media Bias & Ignorance
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9. Fear of Peer Rejection
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13. The Existence of Actual Fraud: The hyperskeptical mind illogically reasons that one black crow proves that all crows are black.
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16. The Roving Subconscious (Super-Psi): A goodly number of the pioneers of psychical research came to believe in the reality of psychic phenomena but remained skeptical on the spirit and survival issues. They hypothesized that a “secondary personality” buried in the medium’s subconscious telepathically picked up the thoughts of the sitters, somehow processed those thoughts, and intelligently communicated information as if it were coming from a deceased person. For many reasons this theory as an "explanation" for afterlife evidence is untenable.
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29. Absolute Proof Fallacy: While the debunker and lay person demand “absolute proof,” the true scientists realizes that proof is subjective and a matter of evidence. The evidence developed in psychical research is not within the domain of pure or exact science. Nearly all the phenomena are spontaneous and not subject to replication. It is more “courtroom” science and therefore more subject to a “preponderance of evidence” standard, although some would say it goes far beyond that and meets the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.
(This post was last modified: 2020-05-12, 03:38 AM by nbtruthman.)
Excerpts:
1. Fear of Death: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human mind like nothing else,” wrote anthropologist Ernest Becker in his 1974 Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Denial of Death. Becker explained that to free oneself of death anxiety, nearly everyone chooses the path or repression. That is, we bury the idea of death deep in the subconscious and do our best to escape from the reality of it while avoiding any discussion of what might come after, whether it be total extinction, a horrific hell, or a humdrum heaven. No consideration is given to the more dynamic and progressive afterlife suggested by modern evidence.
2. Philistinism: In escaping from the reality of death, we concern ourselves with mostly meaningless activities – reading and watching fiction, playing games, idle chatter and texting, etc. – what Søren Kierkegaard, known as “the father of existentialism,” called philistinism. A philistine was man fully tranquilized with the trivial. As Kierkegaard saw it, most people are so absorbed in philistinism that they don’t even realize they are in constant despair from their fear of death. Pioneering psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote that most of his patients were non-believers, those who had lost their faith. They were neurotics. “They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking,” Jung explained. “Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning.” In effect, a philistine, even one who subscribes to a religion, becomes increasingly indifferent to matters of the spirit.
......................................
4. Religious Fundamentalism: Based primarily on self-serving or misinterpreted passages in the Bible, most of orthodox religion saw the mediumship studied by psychical research as a demonic practice. Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that some messages coming through mediums conflicted with various Church dogma and doctrine.
5. Scientism: At the other extreme from religious fundamentalism is scientific fundamentalism, also called scientism, a belief that nothing can be accepted as truth unless subjected to testing by application of the scientific method, including replication. The scientific method begins with a materialistic/mechanistic a priori assumption that brain and mind are one in nature...
6. The Causality Paradox: The religionist, the scientist, the media and the general public all assume that we must come up with proof of God before dealing with the survival issue. No God, no afterlife, is their illogical reasoning.
7. Media Bias & Ignorance
......................................
9. Fear of Peer Rejection
.......................................
13. The Existence of Actual Fraud: The hyperskeptical mind illogically reasons that one black crow proves that all crows are black.
.......................................
16. The Roving Subconscious (Super-Psi): A goodly number of the pioneers of psychical research came to believe in the reality of psychic phenomena but remained skeptical on the spirit and survival issues. They hypothesized that a “secondary personality” buried in the medium’s subconscious telepathically picked up the thoughts of the sitters, somehow processed those thoughts, and intelligently communicated information as if it were coming from a deceased person. For many reasons this theory as an "explanation" for afterlife evidence is untenable.
.......................................
29. Absolute Proof Fallacy: While the debunker and lay person demand “absolute proof,” the true scientists realizes that proof is subjective and a matter of evidence. The evidence developed in psychical research is not within the domain of pure or exact science. Nearly all the phenomena are spontaneous and not subject to replication. It is more “courtroom” science and therefore more subject to a “preponderance of evidence” standard, although some would say it goes far beyond that and meets the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.
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